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My Teaching Philosophy

 

When students enter my classroom in the beginning of the semester, the levels at which they can speak in the target language vary greatly. Some students have taken years of Spanish in high school and can barely say a word, while others have only taken a semester or two yet need to be transferred to a higher level class to match their proficiency. The same phenomenon has occurred with self-taught learners; some have used applications such as Duolingo and self-study books for years, but they cannot apply what they have learned to real life scenarios. Self-taught learners that have used conversational applications such as italki, however, often have impressive improvements in their language skills after just a few lessons. After reflecting on the differences between these teaching styles and their success rates (measured in terms of real-life application), I came to the conclusion that communication and interaction is vital to second-language acquisition. For this reason, I utilize a communicative and task-based learning model in my classroom.

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I believe in taking an interaction approach to language learning. Cook explains useful interaction as “keeping the conversation rolling by continuously resolving any difficulties in comprehension” (p. 245).  This approach involves a lot of negotiation of meaning. Negotiation of meaning involves repetitions, reformulations, comprehension checks, and anything else that keeps the conversation going in the target language. A fun activity that I like to do with my students to practice reformulation is having them describe a picture to their partner. At the introductory level, there are many vocab words that students will not yet know; in order to describe the picture, they have to try to get their point across using what they know. Their partner has to draw the picture, and at the end, they compare the real photo to the drawings.

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I utilize communicative teaching as much as possible. As soon as my students enter the classroom, they are given a conversational warm-up that they have to complete with a partner. This warm-up is based off of knowledge they acquired from previous classes. The students are required to complete these activities completely in the target language, but they are free to make mistakes and ask me how to say something if they get stuck. To me, the most important thing (at least at the novice level) is speaking and listening in the target language. If a student makes a mistake, I recast what they said into the correct form rather than outright correcting them or telling them that they are wrong. That way, students do not feel embarrassed but learn to correct themselves in a more subtle and natural way (similar to what they would encounter in “real-life” situations). 

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When I am not using conversational activities, I still try to make the activities interactive. For example, I like finishing class with a popular Latin song that incorporates the vocab we learned from class into the lyrics. I want students to be active listeners for these songs, so I give them a copy of the lyrics with blanks that they have to fill in as they listen. These songs also foster cultural learning. In my opinion, culture is just as important to second language acquisition as grammar is. I provide my students with a cultural fact that is relevant to our current unit at the end of every class. I usually show a brief clip (in English or with English subtitles) accompanied by some comprehension questions. Language and culture are co-dependent; language without culture is meaningless.

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